Must tumble down, And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and "Phe garlands wither on your brow Then boost no more your mighty deeds, Upon Death's purple altar now, See where the victor-victim bleeds, Your heads must come To the cold tomb, Only the actions of the just Smell eweot, and blossom in the dust."
Vol. IV, a large volume of 462 pages, with a complete index, takes us from Johnson to Tennyson. There has not been time for the world to make up its mind as to how many of the writers of the nineteenth century, the Victorian Age, are really immortal, and the coi sequence is that, although all still living writers are intentionally omitted, the number to be noted is so vast, that there is no room for adequate criticism even of those whom claims to immortality are unimpeachable; and so this volume is not much more than a biographical dictionary, chronologically, and not alphabetic cally, arranged. There is little room, too, for the quotations which add so much to the attractiveness, of the earlier volumes but where Mr. Gorse is able to devote a page or two to criticism, his appreciations are generally convincing. His judgment of Tennyson, for instance, will commend itself to all readers, who realise how much of his vogue was due to his splendid opportunism, Secluded as he endeavoured to be in his private life, he was always "in the movement." To people who have loved and lost, which means to every person of sensibility, his "In Memoriam" will always be a cherished possession, and the criticism of it by Mr. Gosse seems cold and unworthy. He says: "What began in a spasmodic record of memories and intolerable regret, closed in a confession of faith and a repudiation of the right to despair. The skill of Tennyson enabled him to conceal this i rand fragmentary construction 'In Memoriam' remains a dis inted edifice, with exquisitely carved chambers and echoing corridors that Tead to nothin Li would be an easy task to pull this criticism to pieces. [ts self-contradiction will be noticed at once.
Mr. Gosse begins by admitting that these echoing corridors lead to a confession of faith and a repudiation of the right to despair. Mr. Gosse's estimate of Browning is more just. The fact is that no one man could possibly in the space of one volume write sufficient notices of all the English authors from Johnson to Tennyson; Mr. Gosse has done all that was possible and has unquestionably made a most interesting volume. Mr. Heinemann has been most liberal in filling the volume with portraits and other pertinent illustrations. Readers of Mrs. Humphry Ward's" The Marriage of William Ashe" will be interested in the portrait, on page 109, of Lady Caroline Lamb, the original of "Lady Kitty." How this portrait comes to be here is a puzzle, except that Lady Caroline was an intimate friend of Byron, for there is no allusion to it in xt, and Mrs. Ward's book was not published when this volume appeared.
Those four volumes, which are amazingly cheap at £3 the set, should be bought and prized by everyone who reads English books. The fourth volume is enriched with an Epilogue, containing portraits of two happily still living writers, Algernon Charles Swinburne and George Meredith, in which Mr. Gosso propounds the theory that the literature of a country is "a vast living organism, directed iv its mani testations by a definite, though obscure" and even inscrutable, law of growth. There is also an Appendix, giving an exact transliteration of the old and middle English manuscripts in the first volume, and of manuscripts and letters inthe first three volumes; and finally there is s complete Index' to the four volumes, compiled by R. J. Lister, which covers 62 three-columned pages of small type, and is a model of what such an index should be.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.